DAVID FA’AULIULI MAMEA has written for film, television and radio. He is a proud member of the New Zealand Writers Guild, and is a trustee of Banana Boat — ‘a bunch of Pasifika and Maori creatives’.
He has won the Adam Award for Best Pasifika Play twice (Goodbye My Feleni, 2013; Kingswood, 2015), the 2013 New Zealand Writers Guild SWANZ Award for Best Play (Goodbye My Feleni), the 2013 New Zealand Radio Award for Best Production (Skyblue), and was the co-winner of the 2011 New Zealand Writers Guild Unproduced Television Script competition (Skyblue). In 2016 David once again took out the New Zealand Writers Guild Unproduced Television Script with his rendering of the pilot script for ‘Firebug’ – what do you reckon…
THE PILOT SCRIPT
Firebug is about a trainee fire investigator who starts setting fires.
Firebug is a television drama that chronicles six months in the life of firefighter LUC WEBSTER. His recent promotion from a station-bound fire officer to fire investigator has an unexpected consequence: no longer on the frontline putting out fires, he discovers a compulsion to start setting them. Some episodes will have a ‘case of the week’ — a fire or accident or rescue — but these will largely reflect the journey Luc is undertaking: just as each ‘case’ has its ‘ignition point’, Luc’s once-latent pyromania has its roots somewhere in his childhood. And his true childhood is not what he remembers. Firebug is a character-driven drama that follows a young man with motivations that are good and well intentioned but whose underlying compulsions are disturbing and questionable.
Firebug won the 2016 New Zealand Writers Guild Unproduced TV Pilot Screenplay competition.